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Vital Line: A New York Collection
PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980)
Steppes
細節
PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980)
Steppes
signed 'Philip Guston' (lower left); signed again, titled and dated 'PHILIP GUSTON "STEPPES" 1978' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
68 x 88 in. (172.7 x 223.5 cm.)
Painted in 1978.
Steppes
signed 'Philip Guston' (lower left); signed again, titled and dated 'PHILIP GUSTON "STEPPES" 1978' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
68 x 88 in. (172.7 x 223.5 cm.)
Painted in 1978.
來源
Estate of the artist
David McKee Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1982
David McKee Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1982
出版
R. Toucatt, "Metamorphosis: The Art of Philip Guston," The Threepenny Review, vol. 1, no. 3, Fall 1980, p. 24.
Shifting Visions: O'Keeffe, Guston, Richter, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 1998, p. 49.
Philip Guston: Now, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2020, p. 239.
R. Storr, Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, London, 2020, p. 190.
The Guston Foundation, The Philip Guston Catalogue Raisonné, digital, ongoing, no. P78.003 (illustrated).
Shifting Visions: O'Keeffe, Guston, Richter, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 1998, p. 49.
Philip Guston: Now, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2020, p. 239.
R. Storr, Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, London, 2020, p. 190.
The Guston Foundation, The Philip Guston Catalogue Raisonné, digital, ongoing, no. P78.003 (illustrated).
展覽
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Denver Art Museum and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Guston: Retrospective 1930-1979, May 1980-September 1981, p. 113, no. 84, pl. 71 (illustrated).
更多詳情
“Guston never forsook his gift for pure painting, or his control over ‘epic’ size canvases. In fact, his late paintings, far from having the flat or impersonal surfaces of Pop, have an impassioned richness of surface, a mix of butter-cream and blood, as luxurious as anything in his delicate abstract pictures.” Kirk Vardenoe
Signaling perhaps one of the twentieth-century’s most dramatic shifts in any artist’s oeuvre, Philip Guston’s Steppes represents a body of work that was his very personal response to the civil unrest that the artist witnessed in the world around him. Debuting in the late 1960s, the unique imagery that began to populate his canvases served as a marked shift away from prevailing tastes for the abstract and toward a more intimate, autobiographical form of figuration. Included in the multi-venue retrospective mounted at the end of his life, Steppes is an enthralling example of Guston’s ability to use the lessons he learned from years as a non-objective abstractionist in service of his new visual language. Remarking on the way in which his previous style filtered into this new trajectory, art historian Kirk Vardenoe explained, “Guston never forsook his gift for pure painting, or his control over ‘epic’ size canvases. In fact, his late paintings, far from having the flat or impersonal surfaces of Pop, have an impassioned richness of surface, a mix of butter-cream and blood, as luxurious as anything in his delicate abstract pictures” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 225). Though the use of bold lines and simply rendered imagery might draw comparisons to the appropriation of material culture by the nascent Pop movement of the same era, Guston’s iconography was fueled more by memory and emotive intrigue than billboards and American commercialism.
In the late 1940s, Guston produced the Porch paintings as a response to the cruel and tragic images of concentration camps in the media. Part of a series of work that Guston began in 1976, Steppes symbolizes a return to this subject matter as he continued to cope with and process Jewish history, the Holocaust and his heritage. For Guston, the inequities of persecution could no longer be suppressed by abstraction. Like many modern artists who escaped war, such as the Surrealist Yves Tanguy, who created haunting, otherworldly landscapes, Guston transformed his memories and trauma into his own visual lexicon. In this case, Steppes, while quite literally recalling the many steps being taken by the congestion of legs within the composition, refers not only to the Russian steppes, but also to the Odessa Steps.
Steppes is especially noteworthy for its hybrid depiction of space and planar arrangements. Separating the picture field into horizontal bands, Guston positions his highly personal iconography in direct relation to an expansive composition that has more connection to the tradition of landscape than his usual claustrophobic canvases. Always bubbling somewhere under the surface, the artist’s wry, dark humor seems to make itself known as the jumble of bent legs and overturned shoes morph into the titular geographic formations before our eyes. The lower third of Steppes is rendered in brushy brick red which leads the eye upward toward the center plane. There, the viewer is stopped by a wall of appendages and the soles of several shoes. The mottled pink skin is outlined in thick, dark strokes that Guston uses to accentuate bony kneecaps and wrinkled surfaces. Similarly, each shoe is demarcated by a circle of dots representing carefully placed cobbler’s nails so prominent in utilitarian leather goods. Above this writhing mass, a strip of silvery blue resembling a hazy sky casts its cold light on the fleshy outcropping and establishes a pictorial vastness not normally seen in Guston’s typically frontal arrangements.
In his last decade, Guston expanded upon his unprecedented figurative shift of the 1960s and continued to explore the role of humble objects and disembodied human anatomy within the painted scene. In the present example, as well as momentous works like Monument (1976), writhing masses of hairy legs bent at the knee begin to overwhelm the field of vision. Bereft of their owners, they search for cartoon-like shoes to cap their sinewy extensions while bumping into neighbors and creating a thick jumble of limbs. Hallmarks of Guston’s later work, these motifs symbolize a human-like presence. Art historian Edward Fry explains, “Shoes became yet a third alter ego, displaced image of selfhood… They gather in strange clusters, legs, knees tangling together in silent hordes...Guston depicts them with a style that is not a style, a homely almost caricature-esque style that renders each image at once both clearly recognizable yet also clothed in a fresh and unforgettable strangeness, as though one were rediscovering one’s own world’’ (E. Fry, Philip Guston: The Late Works, exh. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 19-20). The objects and individuals in these paintings are almost instantly recognizable if not distinctly menacing. Whether depicting a bare lightbulb, a shoe, or a human body part, Guston’s style is unmistakable in its reference to contemporary events, print media, and popular culture, but unique in its expressive rendering. Drawing upon imagery from his childhood, the artist infused these forms and figures with darker personal details that reflected the portentous shadow which was cast over these challenging times.
Signaling perhaps one of the twentieth-century’s most dramatic shifts in any artist’s oeuvre, Philip Guston’s Steppes represents a body of work that was his very personal response to the civil unrest that the artist witnessed in the world around him. Debuting in the late 1960s, the unique imagery that began to populate his canvases served as a marked shift away from prevailing tastes for the abstract and toward a more intimate, autobiographical form of figuration. Included in the multi-venue retrospective mounted at the end of his life, Steppes is an enthralling example of Guston’s ability to use the lessons he learned from years as a non-objective abstractionist in service of his new visual language. Remarking on the way in which his previous style filtered into this new trajectory, art historian Kirk Vardenoe explained, “Guston never forsook his gift for pure painting, or his control over ‘epic’ size canvases. In fact, his late paintings, far from having the flat or impersonal surfaces of Pop, have an impassioned richness of surface, a mix of butter-cream and blood, as luxurious as anything in his delicate abstract pictures” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 225). Though the use of bold lines and simply rendered imagery might draw comparisons to the appropriation of material culture by the nascent Pop movement of the same era, Guston’s iconography was fueled more by memory and emotive intrigue than billboards and American commercialism.
In the late 1940s, Guston produced the Porch paintings as a response to the cruel and tragic images of concentration camps in the media. Part of a series of work that Guston began in 1976, Steppes symbolizes a return to this subject matter as he continued to cope with and process Jewish history, the Holocaust and his heritage. For Guston, the inequities of persecution could no longer be suppressed by abstraction. Like many modern artists who escaped war, such as the Surrealist Yves Tanguy, who created haunting, otherworldly landscapes, Guston transformed his memories and trauma into his own visual lexicon. In this case, Steppes, while quite literally recalling the many steps being taken by the congestion of legs within the composition, refers not only to the Russian steppes, but also to the Odessa Steps.
Steppes is especially noteworthy for its hybrid depiction of space and planar arrangements. Separating the picture field into horizontal bands, Guston positions his highly personal iconography in direct relation to an expansive composition that has more connection to the tradition of landscape than his usual claustrophobic canvases. Always bubbling somewhere under the surface, the artist’s wry, dark humor seems to make itself known as the jumble of bent legs and overturned shoes morph into the titular geographic formations before our eyes. The lower third of Steppes is rendered in brushy brick red which leads the eye upward toward the center plane. There, the viewer is stopped by a wall of appendages and the soles of several shoes. The mottled pink skin is outlined in thick, dark strokes that Guston uses to accentuate bony kneecaps and wrinkled surfaces. Similarly, each shoe is demarcated by a circle of dots representing carefully placed cobbler’s nails so prominent in utilitarian leather goods. Above this writhing mass, a strip of silvery blue resembling a hazy sky casts its cold light on the fleshy outcropping and establishes a pictorial vastness not normally seen in Guston’s typically frontal arrangements.
In his last decade, Guston expanded upon his unprecedented figurative shift of the 1960s and continued to explore the role of humble objects and disembodied human anatomy within the painted scene. In the present example, as well as momentous works like Monument (1976), writhing masses of hairy legs bent at the knee begin to overwhelm the field of vision. Bereft of their owners, they search for cartoon-like shoes to cap their sinewy extensions while bumping into neighbors and creating a thick jumble of limbs. Hallmarks of Guston’s later work, these motifs symbolize a human-like presence. Art historian Edward Fry explains, “Shoes became yet a third alter ego, displaced image of selfhood… They gather in strange clusters, legs, knees tangling together in silent hordes...Guston depicts them with a style that is not a style, a homely almost caricature-esque style that renders each image at once both clearly recognizable yet also clothed in a fresh and unforgettable strangeness, as though one were rediscovering one’s own world’’ (E. Fry, Philip Guston: The Late Works, exh. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 19-20). The objects and individuals in these paintings are almost instantly recognizable if not distinctly menacing. Whether depicting a bare lightbulb, a shoe, or a human body part, Guston’s style is unmistakable in its reference to contemporary events, print media, and popular culture, but unique in its expressive rendering. Drawing upon imagery from his childhood, the artist infused these forms and figures with darker personal details that reflected the portentous shadow which was cast over these challenging times.
榮譽呈獻
Emily Kaplan
Senior Vice President, Senior Specialist, Co-Head of 20th Century Evening Sale